In Focus: Dear Photograph

“Take a picture of a picture from the past in the present”, is the tagline and submission policy for a Tumblr called “Dear Photograph,” created by the twenty-two-year-old Taylor Jones. The principle is simple: readers submit photos of old photos, held up against the original backdrop, and caption them with short, often quite poignant letters to the original image. I asked Taylor about the project’s origin. “I was sitting at my kitchen table with my family looking through old photographs,” he told me. “I came upon a picture of my little brother in the exact same spot as he was in the present. I was also sitting in the same spot my mom was sitting when she took the photo. I immediately grabbed my camera, and took a picture of the picture.” He posted it and a few more such photographs online, and his site now gets around thirty submissions a day.

Dear Photograph reminds me of similarly clever vintage-image projects, such as the “sleeveface” phenomenon or the photographer Irina Werning’s wonderful “Back to the Future” series, and, as with those, it’s tempting to pull out your own boxes of old photos and play along. The blog is also a somewhat paradoxical example of the value of printing photographs; it’s hard to imagine this experiment repeated with today’s Flickr and Facebook albums. The project is a powerful reminder that digital photos can’t ever quite duplicate how it feels to hold a timeworn, sun-bleached, wrinkled old family photo in your hand.